Several articles popped up in my Facebook feed in the last 24 hours regarding hackers and hacking, from a Cracked.com article about hacker myths to some scary BitCoin news to some scary information about nuclear security to some good old fashioned trolling. I've gathered them up for your entertainment, and as such, I'm also reposting Adobe password theft fun! Enjoy!

Cracked.com has an article this week about hacking myths from movies. Number 4 is also a media myth, that hacking is illegal. In fact, many people, including myself and the author, hack things to find vulnerabilities so that those problems get fixed, hopefully before a bad guy hacker finds them. But there are a lot of other entertaining myths to cover, in typical Cracked style.

In scary BitCoin news, after the shutdown of the Silk Road, a new site rose in popularity to take its place. Sadly, they hadn't thrown quite enough white hat hackers at it because someone got the kind of access to it that allowed money to be withdrawn from people's accounts while still appearing to them as there, allowing BitCoins to be siphoned away in secret. Losses are estimated by some at $98 million US, 60m British pounds. Reddit commentariat is on the case!

One of the problems with passwords is that people make stupid ones. One of the other problems is that the stupid ones are all the same, like "password" or "123456" or "letmein" or "fuckyou." (I reserve that last one for accounts created by people who are not me but using my email address.) If you want to see some more ridiculous passwords, check out the Adobe Password Crossword series, where 100 of the top 1000 most common Adobe.com passwords are the answers and the clues are the set of all password hints for that password. But if that doesn't make you panic and change your passwords, this should fix that little panic problem. For 20 years, the launch codes for all nuclear missiles in the US were 00000000. (That's 8 zeroes.) Apparently, the Cold War was won because the Russians overestimated us.

But you don't really need to run out and change all of your passwords, right? I mean, maybe people want to log into your Adobe.com account and steal your product keys or if you're me, your software betas and NDA info, but who cares if they can log into your wifi, amrite? Information should be free and so should your WiFi! I mean, unless you are loud and piss off your neighbors, in which case they might print things to your unsecured printer, such as the full text of the paper on which the following lecture is based. (Follow along with the video by clicking the link. Pay special attention to the formulas and graphs.)

Remember to tip your hackers, ladies and gents, especially me 'cause I haven't paid rents. Thanks again and I'll be here all week!